I'll openly tell anyone who cares to listen that factory towns are at a severe disadvantage in education. Why? Well, a bunch of reasons, but the biggest problem I see around here is a disregard for any education of any kind that doesn't immediately result in some tangible benefit.
The mentality for this is apparent if you've ever lived in factory towns: generations of people could simply say, "I don't like school!" walk out the front door at 16 years old, and get a job on The Line at The Plant. If not on The Line, at least sweeping floors, or working in a subsidiary support business, built on the spending habits of decently-paid factory workers. If a person wasn't inclined to 'bookishness', they could always find something to do for a halfway decent living.
Economics have now changed, but the basic attitude has not. I can't tell you how many adult people with good jobs I meet who are barely literate, with poor reading skills (low enough to have some difficulty reading a major newspaper), poor spelling skills (I see blatant, first-grade level misspellings on public signs here all the time), and grammar skills that involve mostly 'ain'ts' and 'got nones'.
Few of these people are mentally deficient, and if they are, it's usually due to drug and alcohol abuse, but they are not interested in school. Currently, with yet more factories going under in the state, the Technical Colleges are inundated with people redirecting their lives, and I know for a fact that a goodly proportion of these people flooding out of well-paid factory jobs can't work with even high school level material.
There is another, far more destructive level of attitude, and that has to do with ingrained animosity towards management and 'The Suits', who are inevitably something I've been called whenever I tell people I have a bachelor's degree, which is "College Boy', a description without exception phrased in a hostile manner. The 'College Boy' is the white-shirted grad who shows up as your overpaid supervisor, with a know-it-all demeanor and an ivory tower background, and blue-collar people hate these people like poison. A lot of blue-collar people view college graduation as a badge of treason, of sleeping with the enemy. Their view is anyone going to college is a spoiled brat with no common sense and no heart or soul, who will never know 'the working stiff'.
So there is generations-old hatred of 'higher education', which is viewed as irrelevant, turns out abusive ignoramii, and is for the foul minions of The Corporation, which as everyone knows spends every waking moment (and its dreams as well) coming up with diabolical ways to torment and oppress its workers. This stunningly self-destructive belief system is just now starting to change, with a few people, but by no means all, deciding that some literacy and higher education might not be an altogether evil thing.
Anyway. Some thoughts on why, oh why, so many people I meet in factory towns are so pathologically disinterested in knowledge, or learning about anything other than what's directly in front of their faces.
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I couldn't agree with you more. I worked my way through college in part by doing a non-union, low-paid, low-level management contract job in a union auto plant, and the scorn from the factory rats never stopped.
ReplyDeleteThat plant's closed now. I'm making good money. Go figure.
Yeah. God forbid anyone be able to read or write, or know something about the greater world.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me for some reason, I read an interview with George Romero years ago, in which he discussed influences in creating NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. He vividly discussed the impact of the plant closings in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and how people who had worked at The Plant for generations suddenly had nothing to do and nowhere to go.
ReplyDeleteHe described people walking the streets, aimless and directionless, alive but sort of not, and how the human behavior he saw had a huge influence on the 'zombies' in his movies.